Solo Technology

Ok smart folks, I need your help.

I’m almost recovered from last week’s debacle (literally 100 hours from Friday to Friday. ugh) and am now getting around to sorting out the “not-mission-critical” stuff we lost.

The worst in that category is our wiki. I made the world’s dumbest mistake — I stored the wiki database backups on the same RAID array hosting the actual database. I can point to a task list item to mirror those elsewhere… but it hadn’t happened yet. Thus, when the array was lost, so was our wiki.

So the wiki is gone with tons of of useful content. Since I need to load up a new one, it’s time to address some of the primary complaints the folks at the office had:

1. Editing articles was not user-friendly.
   Oh sure, we geeks can consume and spit out just about any *ml^[1] tags around. But the editing really clobbered the uptake. We had lots of folks interested in using the old Mediawiki wiki  that just got too frustrated with wiki markup.
2. We’re a Windows and .NET shop
   While not a show-stopper, it was mentioned once or twice that it’d be nice if the wiki was in something our devs are more familiar with. That would allow some customization.

I’m looking for a wiki that I can host in the office with some sort of “WYSIWYG” editor — or the ability to add one via plugins or other simple extensions. Ideally, it’d run on IIS and perhaps even use SQL Server, but I’m a bit more flexible there (after all, XAMPP is easy to run).

Anyone have killer ideas? I have some folks in the office suggesting SharePoint. It’s nifty and all, but I really like the instant gratification of a wiki for viewing and editing files. Help me not have to build a SharePoint server!

[1] aka the markup language of your choice. HTML, XML, SGML, whatever.

5 Responses to “Software Hunt!”

1. Light & Dark on July 29th, 2007 11:23 am
   

   The VMWare site has a number of prebuilt Virtual appliances of different Wikis if you wanted to be able to try a few out without the hassle of installing - TWiki, Socialtext etc.

   Sorry I don’t have any recommendations - I’m just embarking on the same search for my new employer. Will be interested to watch what you come up with.

   Paul

2. David Brabant on July 29th, 2007 12:15 pm
   

   Check on http://www.wikimatrix.org for a comparison between wikis.

   ScrewTurn wiki is really nice and seems to fit all your requirements (wysiwyg using the format toolbar).

   http://www.screwturn.eu
   http://www.screwturn.eu/PageEditing.ashx

3. Chris on July 29th, 2007 6:30 pm
   

   @Paul - the vmware tip is good. Makes eval a lot easier.

   @David - WikiMatrix is priceless! Thanks loads for that tip, you’ve probably just saved me hours of digging.

   ScrewTurn would be interesting, but I’ve been assured that format toolbars that add the wiki markup just confuse people (”what are all these single quotes all over my article?”). *sigh*

4. » pingback » Wiki Shopping Part Deux » Solo Technology on July 29th, 2007 6:38 pm
   
   
5. » pingback » Wiki Wrap-up (maybe?) » Solo Technology on July 30th, 2007 9:47 pm
   
   

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